The next evening, I shared the lounge with one other patient up late to watch the sunset. We inmates were, in general, an early-slumbered cohort, but today frustration had goaded me into selective deafness when the evening nurse suggested I return to my bed. It seemed that Victor’s influence extended a few steps beyond the extravagance of my single room; my glare precipitated a hasty retreat, and my companion—an elderly white gentleman with a broken hip and a palsy—happily co-opted my intransigence. The view was of the Hudson and the cliffs of Jersey’s dockyards beyond it. The sun squatted behind the rusted boats and long warehouses, pregnant and hungry and red as the cherry squashed against the remains of my dessert. Not even Victor could do much about the food.
The river had swallowed the sun and I was wondering if those bore-holes burning down my arm might not have some kind of salutary, character-building effect—to remind me of the inevitability of my loveless death, perhaps—when the door opened.
My companion had fallen asleep in his chair, and I could not be bothered to make the awkward turn just to greet a nurse, so I looked at a tanker slowly moving upriver until Dev’s head blocked the view.
“Hi,” he said.
I stared at him; he pulled up a chair across from mine.
“How are you doing, Phyllis?”
I snorted. Same old Dev, caring just enough. “I’m terrific. I hear you’re nursing a broken heart, but then, that’s going around these days.”
He smiled, acknowledging the hit. “For what it’s worth, Marty never deserved you, Pea.”
God, I hated him. Hated the soft fondness in his eyes, his speckled hair, the way he under-aspirated hard consonants.
“Oh, I’m sure he did.” I laughed, and winced. “I’m not exactly a catch.”
Dev just looked at me. “Are you tired? I’m sorry I couldn’t visit earlier. I can come back in the morning.”
He meant this was his first visit. Which meant the goat, the wolf, the broken confession—just a morphine fantasy.
“Let’s get this over with, Dev.”
“And what is this?”
“A deal. A bargain. Probably a short straw for you, frankly, but maybe for old time’s sake? I need your help. With Victor.”
Dev slid a look at the old man, now drooling on the arm of his wheelchair. He stood up, pushed the man outside, and set a chair under the knob to stop someone from interrupting us. I didn’t say anything; paranoia was our cost of business.
“Pea,” he said. “You remember what I told you?”
Did I remember? I wanted to laugh at him, but I was afraid something else might come out.
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“You haven’t asked yet.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t think Trent Sullivan killed those people. And I don’t think, not his girl, either. That night … makes more sense, that way. I think Victor’s been lying, using me on his associates and telling me it’s justice. If that’s true, I figure you might know?”
Dev’s breath left him. He didn’t catch it again for nearly a minute.
“You never suspected.”
In his grated words I recognized something of the voice from my dream. It had been a decade since I had touched Dev like a woman with a lease on his skin, but now I reached out, unthinking, to wipe watery tracks from his face. With a faint groan, he pressed his cheek into my hand and closed his eyes, though they still leaked with steady, baffling tears. I didn’t understand what I had said.
“Dev, at the club, you asked me if I believed everything Victor told me…” My voice closed in on itself, cut off by some latent wave of shame. Hadn’t I trusted Victor? It had been safer, certainly, to believe our bargain had held. To never question, or delve deeper into those flashes of unease I felt—yes, just that sickening lurch—ever since I had killed Trent Sullivan. It is difficult to get a woman to understand something that her heart depends upon her not understanding.
Desperate, I tried, “Why would he lie when he could get a dozen other men on a hit without asking questions?”
Dev’s throat worked against my wrist. “You’re a legend. They’re all terrified of you. Whatever you thought about justice had nothing to do with that power. Of course Victor would use it.”
“Of course,” I repeated. “I have been very stupid. I wish you had told me sooner.”
A sob cracked his throat and he wrenched himself away. He wouldn’t look at me. “Tell me what you need, Pea.”
“If I’ve been … if Victor’s angel has just been another bag man, all this time—” I felt wide open as a swinging door. I felt unhinged. “I want to find whoever’s killing people for their hands. If he just used someone else’s murders as a convenient excuse…”
The look in his eyes. I couldn’t keep speaking, not if this was what it did to him. A moth popped and buzzed against the aging light fixture. The burnished steel of the wheelchair handle glared back at me like Victor’s silver jaw. Dev’s wet eyes stayed on me like a lost dog’s. Lost, like that dog of Tammy’s, that little yippy spaniel she named Josephine or Celeste or Betty depending on the month; she cried for weeks after it ran away during a show and no one had the heart to tell her that Victor had kicked it to death in the alley.
And the world, so happily unmoored and swinging, slotted itself neatly back into place.
“Victor,” I said.
“Who else, Phyllis, who else?”
Victor wanted the hands. And if the hands wouldn’t come to him, then he’d do them like he did the Barkley brothers: he’d just take what anyone else got.
It was cold in here, with the sun gone. Cold as a meat factory. I shook. “But Maryann—how’d she
